Preoccupation

Inspiration

We were inspired by the prevalence of overemployment in the tech industry, the practice of working multiple full time jobs at once. We decided to take the idea of working multiple jobs to the extreme, creating a chaotic satirical portrayal of overemployment.

What it does

Preoccupation is a game that puts you in the shoes of someone who gets the opportunity to work many jobs at once, taking them on and working all of them at the same time. If you make it to the end, you'll become a taxi-driver-delivery-man-ambulance-driver-grader.

How we built it

We built the game in the Unity game engine and created all artistic assets from scratch in pixel art software.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was simply thinking of an idea. Neither of us had a good one coming into the weekend, so we spent several hours brainstorming before we decided to take a nontraditional approach by creating a game. We encountered a bug that caused the Unity editor to seemingly randomly freeze, and it took several hours to track down the source, which turned out to be a loop that had a 1/1000 chance of going infinite when it was ran. I also had the displeasure of programming the arrows that track the current objective, which forced me to remember how trig works.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was both of our first hackathons, and we are both happy that we managed to complete this project in just over a day. Ronan had also never done a game jam and we'd never worked on a game together before. We were worked together very effectively and learned lots.

What we learned

Although both of us had some Unity experience, it had been years since we created anything substantial. So, we both relearned how to use Unity and code in C# (especially the latter, being very used to Python). We both learned new methods for game dev as well, such as creating custom data classes that can be serialized.

What's next for Preoccupation

We plan to flush it out with sound, more art, and more detailed mechanics to turn it into a more complete game before releasing it on itch.io. We also man to add a hearse and a hitman job, and perhaps even an electrician job.

Built With

• c#
• unity